By Charles Mgbolu
Mixed reactions have followed the sudden postponement of a national students’ loan scheme that was supposed to be launched on Thursday by the Nigerian government.
The scheme, whose announcement in June was greeted with excitement and optimism, has been suspended.
This is to ensure that all those concerned are carried along, the government said. “Unfortunately, I won’t be able to commit to a specific date.
We are sort of waiting to ensure that all the stakeholders are aligned to make sure that nobody is blindsided, then we can actually roll this out in a meaningful, comprehensive, wholesome, and sustainable way,” Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, Akintunde Sawyer, told a Nigerian news channel, Arise News, on Tuesday.
Third time failed take-off
In June 2023, President Bola Tinubu signed a bill to start the Student Loan Fund that would give interest-free loans to Nigerians for higher education.
Primary and junior secondary school education is offered free of charge in Nigerian public schools but millions of Nigerians find it difficult to advance to tertiary institutions partly due to financial constraints.
This is the third time the take-off of the education programme has been put on hold. It was first supposed to start in October 2023.
The government later announced that it would begin in January 2024. Repaying the loan ‘interest-free’ was the catch for many students who struggle to make ends meet, especially as Nigeria struggles with a high cost of living and soaring inflation and poverty rates.
The suspension of loan scheme’s take-off has come as heartbreaking for many students in Africa’s most populous country.
‘’I feared that the scheme was not going to last long, but it turned out even worse; it never got started,’’ Noel Mba, a 300 level undergraduate, tells TRT Afrika.
In the academic year 2018–2019, Nigerian universities had over 1.8 million undergraduate students and 242 thousand postgraduate students, according to research website Statista.
Loan burden
Nigeria’s government had hoped to target 140,000 students in the first year of the programme aimed at easing access to education for less-privileged students.
‘’I am indifferent about the suspended loan and would not have taken it even if it were not suspended because I still have to pay back the money someday,’’ Samson Oga, a final year student tells TRT Afrika.
‘’With the country's current unemployment rate, with graduates without jobs, how do we repay the loan? You want people to fall into depression because of a debt on their neck?,’’ he queries.
For its part, the University of Lagos chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities believes the Nigerian government should strive to make education at public universities free and not on loans.
’The message is clear. Free education and not student loans,’’ the union wrote on X.
Following the postponement, millions of Nigerians hoping to benefit from the scheme now have to wait further or find an alternative means of financing their university education although the Nigerian authorities say they are determined to implement Education Loan Fund scheme.
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